David Meerman Scott, a well-known marketing strategist, coined the term "newsjacking," which he describes as "the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business." The concept makes sense, and we all know that a great way to gain relevance online is by leveraging hot topics and news items that are beginning to trend-but it's a competitive, and fast-moving, field. How do content marketers stay on top of the relevant trends and news in their industries to ensure they're curating and communicating fresh, engaging content?

Features

MadCap Software, a multi-channel content authoring and showcase company for Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft XPS, released MadCap Flare 7.0, its latest version of content authoring software, on February 28. Making strides to conquer the limitations of print-only authoring software, MadCap Flare 7.0 condenses mobile, web, and print features into what marketing manager Michael Hamilton refers to as a "one XML environment." With this new version emerging, MadCap is eliminating Blaze, the XML-based alternative to Adobe FrameMaker for long print documents.

As far as trends go, this one is easy to call: Over time, more consumers will break away from traditional broadcast channels of television and radio in favor of alternative video viewing platforms such as internet-connect televisions, set-top boxes, and video on demand. At the January Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, manufacturers of web-connected television technologies were showing off new devices that will enable consumers to stream content directly from the web to their television screens.

By now, as the saying goes, "there's an app for that," no matter what "that" might be. Although these on-the-go applications might have captured the imagination of an increasing number of U.S. mobile users, digital content creators are now looking to redefine, fortify, and even replace the app with more comprehensive mobile content delivery strategies that pack in additional relevance, context, real-time information, and functionality, without needing to rely on one OS or handset.

As a mathematical genius in A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe used analytics to assist the government in breaking Soviet codes. While it may not be as exciting as top-secret informant assignments, the analytics industry is expected to take on a lead role in 2011 as businesses embrace its capabilities. The IDC says it expects the global market for analytics software to grow from $25.5 billion in 2010 to $34 billion by the end of 2014.

In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that several popular Facebook applications had been transmitting users' personal identifying information to literally dozens of advertising and internet tracking companies. While Facebook maintains that there is "no evidence that any personal information was misused or even collected as a result of this issue," not all observers have been appeased.

At the very time that library budgets were being slashed, demand for the services provided by these institutions was increasing in the communities they served. Libraries have had to reprioritize and get creative with budgets. A new study called "Funding and Priorities: The Library Resource Guide Benchmark Study On 2011 Library Spending Plans" takes a look at how these pressures are manifesting in all types of libraries across the country. Produced by the Library Resource Guide (LRG) in conjunction with Unisphere Research, the market research division of Information Today, Inc (ITI), research was conducted in October and November 2010 among libraries listed in ITI's American Library Directory.

2010 was a landmark year for the ebook industry. In July, Amazon announced that it was doing more trade in ebooks than in hardcovers, selling 143 digital editions for every 100 hardcovers sold. Then, in October, the Association of American Publishers and the International Digital Publishing Forum released figures showing a 250% increase between 3Q 2010 and the same time period the previous year.

In recent months the content industry has seen a big push toward hyperlocal news. Companies like AOL and Gannett have made serving local markets a big part of the companies' individual content strategies. Examiner.com-a site dedicated to providing users with local information, news, and discussions-has been at the forefront of the local content farm movement. On February 9, Examiner announced a partnership with LivingSocial to take it one step further and provide its readers with local "daily deal" discounts.

Every once in awhile a story comes along that allows us to see how the wonders of modern technology can help us better understand and preseve our past. One such story hit the wire back in December when Gale, a part of Cengage Learning and McMaster University announced an agreement that allowed Gale to digitize McMaster University's collection of materials related to the Holocaust, propaganda, and the Jewish underground resistance movement during World War II.

Consider the value if you could learn about the world around you based on where you are using the GPS capability in your smartphone. Imagine for a minute holding up your phone and having relevant content delivered to you based on your physical location at any given moment. There are complex and useful applications of the location dynamic beyond simply communicating "I'm here."

One of the biggest problems with advanced software isn't with the technology at all - it's the human element. As systems and services become more complex, they also become harder to use and harder to customize. An agile software platform becomes considerably less agile when every tweak, upgrade, and change requires the intervention of the IT department or other specialized technical professionals. CoreMedia is looking to solve this common conundrum for those in the content management sphere with its CoreMedia 6 content management platform and the new CoreMedia Studio feature, released on Jan. 26.

Next week, on Jan. 25-26, people will gather at the SIIA Information Industry Summit at Cipriani, on New York's City's 42nd Street, along with the 26th Annual CODiE Awards. For the fifth year in a row, the conference will include presentations from eight "Preview" companies, which include Confab Circuit, Panjiva, RapidBuyr, REonomy, SYNQWARE, Transparensee Systems, Verisma Systems, Inc., and VisibleGains.

In a culture filled with tweets, apps, and high-resolution video, when users need technical information and online help, they no longer just want it delivered fast; they want it delivered in the most engaging and exciting way possible. Bullet-point lists and 2D slides do not cut it anymore. The way we consume content is shifting, and at Adobe, those working with technical communication services are ready for the change. Targeting technical communicators, Adobe released version three of its Technical Communication Suite, on Jan. 11, an authoring and publishing toolkit for technical information and training material.

All eyes are on Las Vegas this week as the shiny, new tech toys for 2011 are being unveiled at International CES, held January 6-9. One company launching its products at the show is Live Editions, which provides a range of professional digital publishing products and services that let publishers and information-intensive organizations publish rich, interactive multimedia ebooks or "live editions." The company debuted its products at the Lunch at Piero's media event January 6 and 7."Our solutions enable our clients to repurpose their content by automatically transforming documents into interactive enhanced ePubs, creating new revenue opportunities and leverage their existing content assets," says co-founder Eric Kmiec.

For many companies, standalone email is no longer adequate for workplace communication. As workers grow accustomed to using more real-time social tools in their personal lives, companies are turning to technology providers like Saba to help transform the workplace. The company says it will officially announce the newest version of its social media tool, Saba Live, now with connectors to Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook later this week.

While attendees are far ranging in origins, interests, and expertise, Luddites were not well represented at the Enterprise Search Summit. In fact, it seemed as if every other attendee is a card-carrying technophile, clutching the latest gizmo or gadget (or several at once) and deftly splitting their attention between the real world and whatever digital goings-on are otherwise occupying their minds.

Publishers of all types have been scrambling to stay ahead of-and in some cases, just keep up with-emerging digital content technologies and to position themselves as leaders in the changing content market. Now publishers are turning the page on a new chapter - most likely of an ebook - at least according to The Gilbane Group. A division of Outsell, Inc., Gilbane released its report "A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing" on November 2.

It is the very breadth, depth, and possibility inherent in semantic technology that can prevent content companies from experimenting with a technology that may be one of the most useful commercial innovations of the past decade. The murkiness of the word itself—not to mention the standards, acronyms, and jargon that can dominate the discussion of semantics—only adds to the confusion.

The internet is bursting at the seams with video. While sites such as YouTube are jampacked with user-generated video content, other sites are serving up professionally made web series along with brand-based video advertising and other sponsored content. But with consumers' attention spans already stretched to the breaking point, the real question has become how to turn this mismatched mountain of video into concrete revenue and effective advertising.

The Madison Avenue of the Mad Men era is long gone. Gone are the days of Don Draper and the simple, catchy jingles of yesteryear. Advertising is a much more complicated business these days, with savvy customers, multi-channel campaigns, and global markets.

Regardless of where they work and who they are, all employees have valuable knowledge to give and receive. That knowledge is perhaps one of the most important assets an organization can possess. Companies are increasingly recognizing the value of that knowledge, and how leveraging collaborative tools integrated with knowledge capture can not only streamline complex business processes but also provide valuable insight organizations can use today and tomorrow.

It's happened to you plenty of times. You're standing in the checkout line at the grocery story, half-heartedly gazing at all the vacuous gossip magazine covers that proclaim the latest reality show stars' divorces or the most recent travails of that Hollywood celebutante who seems to be in constant transit between rehab and jail, when you think longingly to yourself, "If only I had access to the latest issue of the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter right now."

Sometimes it can be easy to forget just how broad the term "publishers" can be, but attending the MarkLogic Digital Publishing Summit 2010 on October 28 was a great reminder. Publishers come in all shapes and sizes: From book publishers to legal publishers to app builders, publishing is a diverse, if sometimes floundering, industry.

Social search is still so new, it can sometimes be hard to get experts to agree on what it is or, more importantly, what it has the potential to be. As even major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! offer social search results and new specialized tools pop up, the face of search may just be changing forever.

At the Adobe MAX developer conference yesterday, Adobe announced the release of Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2.5. The new version of LiveCycle is designed to increase the number of features and capabilities available to end users, particularly mobile users, and to streamline the use of information within a company or organization.

The volumes of information now at the fingertips of companies and enterprises present unique challenges, not only in terms of understanding but also preservation, indexing, and security. One of the companies helping the enterprise meet these challenges is MarkLogic. The company has apparently had a very productive year so far, with its number of customers now topping 200. And with the 4.2 release of their MarkLogic Server platform on October 19, the company is showing that it hasn't forgotten about the fundamentals.

For almost as long as there have been books, there have been authors trying to get their manuscripts in front of an acquisitions editor. Today, there are many roads that can lead writers to professional publication. While the destination is often the same, new routes are emerging all the time.

Over the course of one frenetic week this summer, two major media companies-the Academy Award-winning art-house film production company Miramax and the venerable 77-year-old weekly news magazine Newsweek were sold off to wealthy investors by their longtime parent companies. Before the dust had settled, the bookselling giant Barnes & Noble (B&N) announced that it too was looking for a prospective buyer.

It's a simple fact of human nature: People tend to be more engaged and alert when they receive information from a person speaking directly to us rather than something static, such as an office memo. It's this fact that serves as one of the underlying philosophies behind VBrick Systems, a Connecticut-based enterprise IP video vendor that serves the corporate, government, education, and media markets, with customers ranging from K-12 schools to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Like it or not, being tracked by advertising and search companies is a fact of life on the internet. Detractors of the practice frame it as an invasion of privacy, while its proponents argue that the practice-and the finely targeted advertising it makes possible-is an essential feature of the internet business landscape, which allows free sites such as Google and Yahoo! to post profits without having to charge their users directly.

With the proliferation of search-oriented online content providers such as AOL, Yahoo!, Demand Media, and About.com, internet users are increasingly likely to find that most of the general searches they do return results from these SEO-oriented content creators and so-called "content farms". Whether this is a good or a bad thing from the user perspective remains to be seen—and opinions vary. But from general tactics, to long tail search and universal search strategies, SEO remains critical to web publishers.

For the past few years, one could hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about healthcare reform or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Outsell's David Bousfield has taken a deeper look at how content companies can use one to improve the other in his report "Growth Trends in the Market for Clinical Decision Support Tools."

Don't sound the death knell for Microsoft Office just yet. Every year or so, someone predicts the end of the Office empire, but it's simply not happening, says "The Next Wave of Office Productivity," released in August by Forrester Research, Inc. However, there is a shift in which tools within the Office suite are used, and are slowly being replaced by other solutions.

Twenty years ago when the web was young, the topic of standards was mainly the purview of computer scientists, engineers, and enterprise technologists. But these days, with the impact of standards on everything from how content displays in various browsers and delivery on emergent devices to cost savings and search engine optimization (SEO), web standards have become everyone's business. Analysis by Nancy Davis Kho.

It's easy to stop thinking about the changing content landscape over the summer. The days are long and hot, and you're more worried about avoiding the heat than you are about the future of media. However, at least two prominent figures still had media on their minds and were making (sometimes outlandish) predictions.

These days, getting lots of information is easy; it's using that information productively that's the tricky part. The task is even more difficult when that information comes not from a single information resource, but from several. But for users of Elsevier's various scientific resources, that task just got a little easier thanks to the August 30 release of a unified research platform called SciVerse.

Content might still be king at global health and science publisher Elsevier, but the old definitions of content can't keep pace with the increasingly fast and faceted data needs of core audiences such as researchers, librarians, universities, and corporations. Taking some inspiration from consumer-driven sites such as Apple.com, Netflix.com, and nytimes.com, Elsevier is putting its content API up for grabs and opening an app marketplace.

There is a new breed of content creator seeking to dominate the world of search-based information gathering by leveraging keyword-driven editorial missions and a huge supply of journalists who currently find themselves in need of revenue streams. Are these so-called content farms the end of cultivated content or do they represent a necessary state in the evolution of the content creation model?

Nepal is not a place many Americans think about on a daily basis. An oblong nation about the size of Arkansas, wedged between India and China, Nepal is perhaps most famous for its oddly-shaped flag and for being home to eight of the 10 tallest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest. Nevertheless, business software and information services provider Reprints Desk is taking an interest in this nation of nearly 29 million, partnering with a charity called Room to Read to build a library in the mountain nation.

As recently as the last decade, content marketing - that is, content not as the product itself but as the basis for engaging a target audience and helping compel that audience to purchase a company's product - was reduced to a fairly short list of flavors. Today, however, companies have an opportunity to engage customers directly with endlessly unfolding content communication opportunities.

From encrypted passwords to firewalls, a company will expend immeasurable amounts of energy and money to protect its information. Just keeping data safe from outside assaults is an on going task, but company outsiders are no longer the only ones who pose a threat. Insiders with unlimited access to sensitive data can cause just as much damage to an organization as the average hacker. On July 13, 2010, Imperva, a data security company, aims to mitigate the problems that accompany securing sensitive information with the release of SecureSphere File Security.

Facebook has already given us new meanings for words such as "friend" and "poke." Now, it's aiming to put its own spin on the word "like," slapping the word on a button that Facebook executives hope will tie content across the web together on a single networking platform-its own.

Can you easily find the government information you need? Do you feel empowered to share your ideas? Do you think your ideas are being heard and acted upon? Do you believe government is spending our money more wisely? If you can't answer yes to these questions, then we need to look at what's being done and what can be done to improve our government's credibility and ability to serve the American people.

The government sector finds itself between two pressure points: the public's demand for content access and up-to-date information and that same public's demand for costs to be kept down. As a result of these technological and economic requirements, open source technology—which allows source code to be publicly available—has quietly become the solution of choice for government entities at the national, state, and local level.

A recent comScore survey found that nearly a third of mobile social users used their phones for social networking to the exclusion of all other mobile content. Yet most smartphones go far beyond social networking, offering up secondary features that drive price tags ever upwards. Now, Microsoft and Nokia are bringing to market a series of "social phones" that try to keep the networking but ditch the sticker shock.

On May 4, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google planned to begin selling ebooks in June or July with the introduction of the Google Editions. However, in an already crowded and chaotic ebook market, one has to wonder where Google will fit in.